Child of My Heart - Paperback

by Alice McDermott (Author)

The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island, Theresa is her town's most sought-after babysitter--cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has come to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place. While Theresa copes with the challenges presented by the neighborhood's waiflike children, the tumultuous households of her employers, the attentions of an aging painter, and Daisy's fragility of body and spirit, her precocious, tongue-in-cheek sense of order is tested as she makes the perilous crossing into adulthood.

In her deeply etched rendering of all that happened that seemingly idyllic season, Alice McDermott once again peers into the depths of everyday life with inimitable insight and grace. As Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Review of Books, Child of My Heart is "richly textured [and] intricately woven . . . A work not only of, but about, the imagination."

Author Biography

Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, including The Ninth Hour; Someone; After This; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and That Night--all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. For more than two decades she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.